At present, there are millions of home and office “security systems” installed. There are thousands of security companies that install and monitor security systems. Many patents are directed to various aspects and functionalities of such systems. Typically, these systems comprise a set of sensors connected to a telephone dialer and are designed for passive monitoring with a telephone response to a police or fire responder. Most, if not all, of these are directed to home protection or building protection at times when the building or home is not occupied. These employ a variety of incursion sensors and alarm devices and are primarily intended for protection of unoccupied property, not for protection of occupants. There is a large industry of providers of security and alarm devices and security system monitoring services. A search of “alert or alarm and systems” on MSN produced 120283 hits. There are some 3594 companies listed at http://dmoz.org/Business/Business_Services in the security/alarm services business.
Some systems involve a call-back function, in which the central station calls the home when it receives an alarm to verify if the alarm was inadvertent. This is the “are you OK” query-type system to assist in protection of occupants. If the answer is inappropriate, e.g., not according to a pre-arranged code, is strange or otherwise suspicious, or the occupant answers that help is needed, then the central station staff sends the appropriate help responder: fire, police, or medical service. Still other systems permit visual or/and audio monitoring of a remote site via telephone line, Internet connection or other links.
Currently, many public facilities such as schools, courthouses, other government buildings, sports facilities and hotels have generic alarm systems, such as fire alarm bells or horns that ring throughout the entire facility and are intended direct all occupants to evacuate the building. There are many examples of communications failures incident to emergency situations in facilities with this type of alarm installation. Typically, the alarms give no assistance to responding personnel and do not permit clarifying or change in status of event-in-progress information being provided to the occupants to supplement the initial raw alarm information. The usual response to such alarms is to evacuate the building through pre-assigned exit routes, assemble at pre-assigned points, and await instruction. There is little, if any, flexibility in the alarm and response system; communication is tenuous, slow, and difficult to control and subject to failure.
Modern schools and government facilities, for example, are typically built with distributed architecture, having many outlying buildings in a campus-type setting. Installation of a centrally controlled alarm bells or horns does not enable alerting only selected sub-areas of the sites to dangerous or hazardous events or situations without alarming and evacuating the entire complex. This leaves the evacuated population to learn by rumor the nature of the event (which is usually incomplete or wrong), provides no assistance in monitoring the progress of events or directing rescue action to rapid response personnel (e.g., police, fire, medical, SWAT, or hostage teams).
Accordingly, there is an unmet need in the art for a rapid alert system that: is easily configurable to a wide range of different types of publicly-accessed facilities: is adaptable to facilities of very wide range of very different architectures: permits feed-into and feed-back between remote sites and an administrative center; permits triggering of alerts from remote locations and from the sites themselves where hazardous or dangerous events occur; can trigger different types and levels of alerts (e.g., lockdown, shelter in place, evacuate, or all clear) for different types of events; permits “silent” alarms; enables remote audio monitoring (listen-in capacity) and remote viewing (in the physical sense, not the psychic sense) of the event in progress; permits obtaining from, or providing clarifying information to, authorities and responders; permits change in alarm nature or status as the event unfolds, including an event-end “all clear”; and permits local and on-site access to the system by arriving response professionals, including access to database(s) of prior collected and archival information, such as maps of the facility architecture, site layout, response tactical plans, facility operational systems access, controls and data base(s).